Analysis and Evaluation of Feature Selection and Feature Extraction Methods

Hand gestures are widely used in human-to-human and human-to-machine communication. Therefore, hand gesture recognition is a topic of great interest. Hand gesture recognition is closely related to pattern recognition, where overfitting can occur when there are many predictors relative to the size of the training set. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce the dimensionality of the feature vectors through feature selection techniques. In addition, the need for portability in hand gesture recognition systems limits the use of deep learning algorithms. In this sense, a study of feature selection and extraction methods is proposed for the use of traditional machine learning algorithms. The feature selection methods analyzed are: maximum relevance and minimum redundancy (MRMR), Sequential, neighbor component analysis without parameters (NCAsp), neighbor component analysis with parameters (NCAp), Relief-F, and decision tree (DT). We also analyze the behavior of feature selection methods using classification and recognition accuracy and processing time. Feature selection methods were fed through seventeen feature extraction functions, which return a score proportional to its importance. The functions are then ranked according to their scores and fed to machine learning algorithms such as Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), and Decision Tree (DT). This work demonstrates that all feature selection methods evaluated on ANN provide better accuracy. In addition, the combination and number of feature extraction functions influence the accuracy and processing time.